The
importance of identifying and testing the assumptions that determine how
organizations and technologies are designed sounds so obvious – yet we’ve
learned that, when we don’t press managers, consultants, and researchers
(including ourselves) to take a hard look at their deeply held beliefs about
what they are doing and why, they will unwittingly do horrible – or at least
very expensive – things over and over. In the management arena, the assumptions held by people who design
organizations are often dangerous half-truths. So, for example, assuming that human beings are always selfish and can’t
be trusted is dangerous because, if you operate on that assumption, you will
design a fear-driven organization that will encourage people to act that way –
and never give people a chance to earn trust.
Another area is teacher incentives and student
test scores. Politicians and school
administrators often argue that teacher’s pay should be linked to student test scores. That all sounds wonderful, until you start
examining the basic assumption: If teachers work harder, their students will do
better on standardized tests. Unfortunately, if you dig into this assumption, you will start realizing
that teachers have little or no control over which students they teach, how
many students are in their classes, what levels of resources they have, and
what materials they use. So, even if
financial incentives do actually encourage teachers to work harder (another
suspect assumption), increasing motivation doesn’t increase student performance
much, if at all, because teachers don’t have enough control over the work. And,
at least in the short-term, incentives don’t affect teacher’s knowledge and
skill.
That
is why studies going back nearly 100 years show that teacher incentive pay has
little if any impact on student achievement scores. It does have other predictable
effects: teachers and school administrators will try to change things that
they can control: Like cheating on the tests to get their students higher
scores, either by changing the forms themselves or telling students the right
answers. And, as I’ve heard from researchers and parents in the Chicago school
system, teachers respond to these incentives by moving their weakest students
into special education classes (which are overflowing with kids who really
aren’t well-suited to those classes) and when they have a gifted child who
should probably skip a grade or move to a classroom or school of gifted kids,
they squelch efforts to take those kids out of their classes. In other words, the incentive pay does affect
teacher effort: They focus on ways to get their test scores up that they can
control, even though those changes have nothing to do with student learning,
and in fact, may actually undermine learning. Yes, incentives do drive behavior, but sometimes the wrong kind (See
Chapter 5 of Hard Facts for an
in-depth discussion of incentives).
What
does this have to do with escape from submarines? Perhaps the clearest, and most troubling,
case I know of a deadly assumption (that was held for over 50 years) has to do
with the problem of escaping from a sunken submarine. C.B. “Swede” Momsen was a colorful and
charismatic U.S. Naval officer who unwittingly perpetuated false and deadly
beliefs about the best way to ascend to the surface. Check out The
Terrible Hours to read about this maverick. Momsen was deeply disturbed by
several incidents where submariners were trapped at depths of 100 to 200 feet beneath
the surface, with no apparent means for escape. They all died waiting for a rescue that never came. “Swede” dedicated years of his life to
developing the Momsen lung in the 1930’s, a complicated apparatus that –- by
the time development was completed — included a mouth piece, a breathing bag,
a canister of soda lime, goggles, a nose clip, and a marker buoy attached to
500 feet of rope that had a knot every ten feet. The idea was “Escaping submariners were to
pause every ten feet, where they found a knot, so as to ascend no faster than
fifty feet per minute.” The Germans had
used a similar device called the Dräger breathing set, going back to World War
I.
The
perceived need for these cumbersome devices – and the actions of people on
submarines –were based on the assumption that simply exiting the submarine and
swimming to the surface meant certain death. But research done after World War II showed that this assumption was
false: at depths of less than 300 feet, a trapped submariner’s best chance of
survival was a “free ascent.” As Ann
Jensen’s 1986 article Why
the Best Technology for Escaping from a Submarine is No Technology reports:
The solution was a British suggestion. Inflate a life jacket while
in the submarine. The jacket would be designed with a flapper valve to release
the expanding air as it carried its wearer upward. “Once you’re out, you start
blowing as hard as you can blow,” said Schlech. “The jacket takes you up and
out of the water like a shot. We called the system ‘Blow and Go.’ There was a
lot of opposition at first, but eventually it got rid of the Momsen Lungs and
all the other equipment, and it’s still in use in depths of up to three hundred
feet.”
Moreover,
Jensen reports that German experience going back to World War I showed that –-even
without a life jacket — simply exhaling while making the ascent is effective
as well, although such experience was not known or was ignored as research focused
on developing better devices for escaping submarines, even though none were
needed. To quote Jensen’s article:
mine north of Scotland
in 1915, is typical. The U-boat went down in 128 feet of water with twenty men
alive inside. The air in the submarine quickly filled with chlorine gas as
seawater flooded the boat’s electric batteries. The fumes burned the men’s eyes
and made breathing nearly impossible. Their ears ached as pressure increased.
They found only four Dräger units aboard; believing their situation hopeless,
two of the men shot themselves. Then the captain decided to make one last,
desperate effort to save the remainder of his crew by opening a hatch.
To his amazement the hatch flew open and he was drawn out and
upward. He had no time to inflate his life jacket or even to take a breath. As
he recounted later, “I had no desire to inhale, but to forcibly exhale so that
I constantly had to blow air out.” The air in his lungs had expanded as he
rose. If he hadn’t exhaled, his lungs probably would have burst. The rest of
the crew followed him; seven survived the ascent and were later picked up.
The
upshot is that –- whether you are talking about teachers or technology –-
stopping to identify and test your assumptions is something that isn’t done
often enough, and can save a lot of money and a lot of lives. And a related
lesson, as I’ve written about before, is that the most effective people and
organizations are often masters
of the obvious.
Leave a Reply